Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,760 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    It’s a handsomely crafted portrait overall, yet one whose middleweight content flatters the subject without ultimately quite doing him justice.
  2. White Fang
    The rewards here are ones of fine, subtle sensory detail, be it the shimmering visualization of falling snow on a forest floor, the convincing, characterful nature of the animal sound effects, and the grand, graceful design and movement of the wolfdogs themselves — as expressive and adorable as any Disney critter.
  3. Constructing Albert
    Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.
  4. Siberia
    In the end, it can never decide what kind of film it wants to be, drifting into drab formlessness when it needs to find moments of poetry, and reverting to dull clichés when it wants to indulge its thriller instincts, winding up as frosty and uninviting as its setting.
  5. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    This Midsummer Night’s Dream actually works. It’s charming, funny and moderately sexy, with witty use of the disconnect between modern manners and melodious prose. And yes, the actors can speak the language — which, as many a movie has proven before, is never a given.
  6. Broken Star
    Broken Star is a thriller interested in voyeurism, the camera’s affect on both subject and photographer, and the tangled relationship between art and artist, fiction and reality. What it’s not, however, is capable of processing those ideas in a manner that might be compelling, much less thrilling.
  7. The Equalizer 2
    Judging by the ponderous tone and pace, Fuqua thinks he’s making high art (likely aspiring to something existential like Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï”), but this is a grisly exploitation movie at best.
  8. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    “Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.
  9. BuyBust
    BuyBust is a superbly executed action film about drug squad members fighting for their lives in a maze-like Manila slum that resembles nothing less than hell on earth.
  10. The Feels
    As a comedy, The Feels has considerable sprightly appeal, although it could have used slightly more assertive visual packaging.
  11. Poor Boy
    Robert Scott Wildes’ directorial debut is the sort of out-of-control whatsit that spins about like a decapitated chicken in its spastic death throes.
  12. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense. He places audiences just over Cruise’s shoulder, or staring into the actor’s face as he grimaces with exertion.
  13. After Everything
    Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).
  14. The Other Side of Everything
    Mila’s film honors Srbijanka’s legacy of activism and brings her spirit of honor and responsibility to a new generation and a wider audience.
  15. The Night Eats the World
    The very definition of a well-made movie that nonetheless really needn’t have been made at all, Rocher’s entry into the canon will attract a few zombie completists, but provide little fun for the average genre buff and underwhelming reward for art-house audiences.
  16. Dark Money
    In contrast to the very personal “Prodigal Sons,” Reed’s sophomore feature is straightforward reportage, telling a complex, multi-issue story with a large number of players, in admirably cogent terms.
  17. 7 Splinters in Time
    A time-traveler becomes fragmented in disastrous ways, and so too does the film itself, in “7 Splinters in Time,” edited to ribbons in a schizoid manner that likely only makes complete sense to its maker.
  18. Skyscraper
    On the scale that ranges from implausibly entertaining to entertainingly implausible, Skyscraper comfortably falls toward the compulsively over-the-top end, generating thrills by straining credibility at every turn, relying on Johnson’s invaluable ability to engage the audience while defying physics, common sense, and the sheer limits of human stamina.
  19. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.
  20. Moss
    In addition to its scenic virtues, there’s a pleasant sense of life’s innate harmoniousness here.
  21. The Lighthouse
    Economically deployed effects lend the gathering storm a genuine sense of anxious bluster, but tension and terror are harder to conjure in a narrative this sparse and emotionally one-note.
  22. The First Purge
    The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”
  23. Calibre
    If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of Calibre’s assembly that keeps it startling.
  24. This Is Congo
    As a contemporary study of the violent struggle between the hamstrung Congolese national army and M23 rebel forces in the North Kivu region, the film is often blisteringly effective, venturing to the frontline in pursuit of raw war footage likely to open many an outside viewer’s eyes — or, at its harshest interludes, prompt them to squeeze tightly shut.
  25. Winter Brothers
    While we may not always know what Pálmason means, there’s the undeniable sense that he does, and mostly, that’s enough to add up to an impressively original, auspiciously idiosyncratic debut, one that scratches away at truths about masculinity, lovelessness and isolation, that are no less true for being all but inexpressible.
  26. Ideal Home
    Ideal Home is a trifle, but more than that it’s caught between eras, poised between wanting to crack you up at what cranky prima donnas its characters are and to make you tear up at the revelation of their normal hearts. The result? A comedy of flamboyant banality.
  27. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.
  28. Incident In a Ghostland
    It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.
  29. Zoo
    Writer-director Colin McIvor adapts the true-ish story of how a handful of citizens came to the rescue of a baby elephant into an unlikely family film, one that will delight the kids (who see themselves portrayed as heroes) while leaving parents with a lot of explaining to do.
  30. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    It’s uneven practically by design, with a tone that slides all the way from kooky farce to anguished psychological study, just about held together by Mackenzie Davis’s lively, spiky turn in the lead.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »